Catholics have met the enemy, and he is not Obama

John Smeaton, of Britain’s Society for the Protection of Unborn Children (SPUC), titles this post, referencing a Michael VorisRealCatholicTV video from the Philippines: “Episcopal failures to oppose the sexual revolution have global consequences.”

Yes, indeed; but it’s much worse than that: The American (or UK) bishops are not merely “failing to oppose”; they are engaged in the active global promotion of the sexual revolution – through agencies such as their own Catholic Relief Services.

It is actually misleading, and even unfair to Obama one must in justice say, for Voris to posit a special culpability of our current president in this matter; and Smeaton is probably unintentionally or out of politeness letting the UK bishops off the hook a bit by characterizing their sins as ones of mere omission.

I have worked on and off in Africa, for “humanitarian” organizations, for some thirty years, during both Republican and Democratic administrations, and I have not seen that the U.S. Government’s efforts to promote the sexual revolution – with the willing cooperation of the U.S. bishops’ own overseas “humanitarian” organization, and of other “Christian” subcontractors – has varied much in intensity over those years. The “foreign aid” agencies of both the U.S. federal government and the USCCB (the latter a contractor of the former) are both “owned” and staffed by either secularists, or by fellow-traveling-sexual-revolutionist “Catholics” and other vaguely “faith-motivated” types. Regardless of the particular ideology of the sitting president or of the very-theoretical anti-sexual-revolution stance of the bishops, those agencies find ways to effectively advance the sexual revolution. Personnel is policy.

“Very theoretical” opposition of the U.S. bishops? Here, taken from the bishops’ official “post report,” is the advice of Catholic Relief Services-United States Catholic Conference to its employees working in a nearby “developing” country, at a time when (“ho-hum,” yawn the permanent-revolutionists) there was a change from a Democratic to a Republican administration:

It is advisable to bring to post any medications and over-the-counter drugs used regularly and to make arrangements with a U.S. pharmacy for refills. Pharmacies are available in Port-au-Prince but often stock only European pharmaceuticals. Contraceptives are available—but not all kinds. It is preferable to bring your own.

Voris says that Obama is “trying to ram birth control down the Church’s throat.” Does the above official advice of the American-bishops-united-in-conference lead one to believe that that “ramming” is going to be particularly difficult? More pertinently, has the Church not already been very successfully and happily rammed? And, again in justice, and in light of the above amoral advice – typical, we Catholics would admit, if we were not the hypocritically dishonest clericalists that we are, of the past and prevailing active and intentionally accommodationist “stance” of our bishops in the face of the sexual revolution – again: Is it fair to single out Obama as the Rammer-in-Chief?

The (American) Church’s active accommodationism – no ramming necessary, thank you – will continue whether Obama is re-elected or not. The only way to stop it is to stop government-financed “humanitarian” foreign aid altogether. But there is only one presidential candidate interested in moving us toward that ethical end, and he will not be elected. If “foreign aid” continues, and it will, the only way for the bishops and American Catholics to stop their voluntary collusion in the promotion of the global sexual revolution is for their agencies to stop taking government money. Of course, in that unlikely scenario, we American Catholics will still be paying in-voluntary tribute, through our taxes, to the sexual revolution overseas, thanks to a coercive, religious-freedom-violating system of “soft despotism”…which currently has the enthusiastic endorsement of our bishops.

One wonders how they can endorse it? There are reasons of ideology (a particular ideology which, for all of its well-intentioned “humanitarianism,” is in clear violation of the Church’s own teaching on subsidiarity). One can also follow the money. Perhaps, on that happy day – brought closer by the Rammer Obama? – when the bishops’ own institutions of etiolated “Catholic” “charity” are no longer themselves benefiting directly and monopolistically from that system of soft despotism, the bishops will have the leisure to more disinterestedly and dispassionately reconsider their default coercive ideology.

For all of his absolutely on-target and courageous criticism of the bishops, Voris actually doesn’t go far enough. He, and other orthodox American Catholics, are either blamelessly ignorant of the full extent of the active collusion in the culture of death and the sexual revolution by American “Catholic” agencies run or approved by the bishops, or they are too embarrassed or “respectful” to acknowledge it. And Obama makes a much easier, and safer, target. But we have met the real enemy…and he is us: us Catholics. Not Obama.

Jon Merrill is the founder and director of Militia Caritatis Dei, a traditionally orthodox, catholically Catholic international charity which conspicuously rejects government funding.